Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, Revised and Updated

Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, Revised and Updated by Dr. Jonathan Graff-Radford M.D. & Angela Lunde M.A.

ISBN-13: 9798887702834
Hardcover: 312 pages
Publisher: Mayo Clinic Press
Released: Aug. 26, 2025

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Help to prevent, slow, and understand Alzheimer’s Disease and other Dementias with this guide from the experts at Mayo Clinic. This essential resource includes key information about the latest advancements in diagnosis and treatment, as well as factors that may affect your cognitive health. While Alzheimer’s disease is the most common type of dementia, other types also affect adults worldwide, causing loss of cognitive functions such as memory, reasoning and judgment. In this fully revised and updated third edition of Mayo Clinic’s on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias leading experts at Mayo Clinic answer patients and caregivers’ most pressing questions, including:

Are there ways you can lower your risk of Alzheimer’s Disease and other dementias? Can they be prevented?

Can you live well with dementia? If so, how?

How do sleeplessness, hearing loss, social isolation, and other risk factors contribute to cognitive decline?

How can exercise and healthy foods preserve brain function?

What are the neurological changes that can occur in the brain, and how is normal aging different from aging with dementia?

How are blood and genetic biomarker tests breaking new ground in diagnosing dementia?

Why is it increasingly important to identify dementia in its early stages?

What are the unique signs and symptoms of Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal degeneration, vascular cognitive impairment, and other dementias?

What are the stages of Alzheimer’s disease?

Can new and emerging medications slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease?

What day-to-day coping strategies can help people live well with dementia?

How can caregivers care for themselves?


My Review:
Mayo Clinic on Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias is a reference book on the various dementias. It primary talked to the reader as if they were the one getting (or concerned about getting) dementia. Some of the last chapters were aimed at caregivers, covering how to best interact with someone with dementia and how to take care of themselves, too. There was a lot of repeated information. For example, an early chapter gave a good amount of information about the different types of dementias, but this information was repeated and expanded upon in a chapter covering each type of dementia (Alzheimer’s disease, Lewy body dementia, frontotemporal degeneration, vascular cognitive impairment, etc.).

The authors talked about possible causes of dementia, risk factors for it, the symptoms and progression, ways to test for it, and treatments for it. They also talked about things that could look like dementia but are caused by things like drug side effects. I appreciated that they covered nutrition and exercise recommendations and didn't focus solely on the drugs. Overall, I'd recommend this informative book.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.

Mastering Chronic Pain by Dr. Sahar Swidan & Dr. Matthew Bennett

Mastering Chronic Pain
by Dr. Sahar Swidan and
Dr. Matthew Bennett

ISBN-13: 9798999258014
Kindle: 380 pages
Publisher: TranscendMed
Released: September 4, 2025

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Living with chronic pain can feel endless and exhausting, especially when nothing seems to help. Mastering Chronic Pain offers hope and a new path forward. In this clear and compassionate guide, orthopedic spine surgeon Dr. Matthew Bennett, MD and pain specialist Dr. Sahar Swidan, PharmD introduce an approach grounded in neuroscience and functional medicine. Instead of masking pain, they show how to work with your body’s biological systems to promote real healing.

This book isn’t about “toughing it out” or chasing the next pill. It’s about understanding what’s really happening in your body and learning how to support your recovery. Inside, you’ll discover: Why pain can continue long after an injury has healed; How to retrain your brain and reset your nervous system; The hidden role of hormones, inflammation, and immunity; Non-medication tools that actually support long-term healing; and a step-by-step guide to your personalized Resilience Code.


My Review:
Mastering Chronic Pain is nonfiction explaining how chronic pain is different than acute pain, why your body can get stuck in pain mode, and how to retrain your nervous system to reduce pain and support healing. I've done a lot of research on chronic pain and have heard much of the information in this book before, so I believe it's both accurate science and useful advice on a variety of non-drug methods that can help reduce pain. They gave just enough medical detail on chronic pain to claim it's a science-based book but spent most of their time explaining things in common language that anyone can understand. They used stories of people dealing with injuries that turned into chronic pain and how they learned about and applied the information in that chapter.

However, it seemed like everything was repeated at least three times, sometimes as a copy-paste from an earlier section and other times with additional information. The last part of the book went over the information (what's causing pain) and pain-reduction methods (Why does this work? How do you do it?) in a different format, but it was basically what we'd already gotten in the first part.

While some of the methods could be taught in brief, step-by-step, text-based instructions, methods like Tapping (Emotional Freedom Technique) really needed either a chart showing where to tap or you need to go to the Tapping website to see how it's actually done. The authors' instructions in this book weren't detailed enough to do you much good. While I recommend this book, I'd have felt it had more value if less time was spent repeating things and more had been spent detailing the more complex methods.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.